Thursday, April 30, 2015

The vilification of Nicola Sturgeon in the London press is delightful, not because it is
at all pleasant but because here at last is a phenomenon that ‘they’ can do
nothing to stop.No matter what their
rage, no matter what their war chest, they cannot win, and the SNP cannot
lose.The only detail left to determine
is whether any other party gets a Scottish seat.It’s looking increasingly unlikely, which
means a second referendum within 10 years is not just inevitable, it’s a huge
waste of time and money.Scotland has
left.

Four weeks ago, the main parties started out more or less where they
seem likely to end up.What’s all that
about then?So long as David Cameron has
no chance of achieving an overall majority, the outcome is pre-determined: Ed
Miliband in power, even if he comes second.Because the SNP were never going to renew Cameron’s tenure and the
FibDems weren’t ever going to be numerous enough to out-vote them.The real shifts come between elections: voting only confirms them.Wessex had better get used to five more years
of Labour control-freakery, five more years, that is, to think more deeply
about the regional alternative that is now the only really worthwhile game in
town.

A recent article points out that, with the end of the two-party system,
hardly any MP south of the border will be returned with over 50% of the vote
(let alone the backing of over 50% of the electorate).Because of the SNP surge, the position north
of the border will be the exact opposite.It will be very ungentlemanly if anyone complains about Scottish
nationalist influence over the government of the UK if the SNP turn out to be only
ones with any democratic mandate at all.

If it’s ‘the economy, stupid’, then stupidity over the economy, putting
all the eggs in the London
basket, is about to deliver some very nasty shocks to an Anglo-British
establishment that has been splendidly outmanoeuvred.The SNP, with their special appeal to the
young of a reborn nation, do think not tactically, nor even strategically, but
transgenerationally.We in Wessex must do
the same, continually making the future of our own young people central to
everything we do.Those passing through
our schools and universities today will be those to govern a free Wessex: make no
mistake about that.

Next year marks the 60th anniversary of a small book entitled
Our Three Nations.It was sponsored jointly by Plaid Cymru, the
SNP and, from England,
Common Wealth, each of the parties contributing three representatives to
undertake the writing.Gwynfor Evans
from Plaid Cymru and Robert McIntyre from the SNP are well-known names, John
Banks, Douglas Stuckey and Don Bannister from Common Wealth much less so.

John Banks later wrote Federal
Britain?, the 1971 classic on regionalism, and served WR as both President
and Secretary-General, drafting our 1982 constitutional policy document, The Statute of Wessex.Douglas Stuckey, now in his 90s, is another
long-standing WR office-holder.Today he
offered the view that instead of flying into a constitutional panic, those in
charge might just re-read O3N, 79
pages of advice that has dated remarkably little.

O3N proposed that the
UK be replaced by a “confraternity”
of free and equal nations; of Common Wealth it said that “Not the least of its tasks is that of making the programmes of the two
National Parties as acceptable to ‘progressive’ circles in England as
Irish Home Rule was in the early part of the century.As Dr McIntyre has said, Nationalism in the British Isles is an English rather than a Scottish, Welsh
or Irish problem.Let England replace
the conception of Empire with that of Commonwealth, within these islands as
well as beyond the seas, and the problem is solved…

The Imperial power
wielded by England
over centuries would receive a mortal blow.The proof of this will be the bitter opposition of all who believe that
imperialism, colonialism and playing a part in Power Politics is still a
desirable policy for the people of the British Isles to follow.Only those who believe that the future for
the English people lies along the road of freely accepted co-operation between
friendly but independent peoples at home and abroad will welcome these
developments and will seek to re-orientate English political life and
institutions accordingly…

Under the new
conditions brought about by Confraternity, the impact of new ideas about politics
will relax the grip of the two-party system.With Welsh and Scottish examples before them, workers in English
industries will start talking about a share in running their own show…Paradoxically, there may even be a resurgence
of English patriotism and national consciousness to take the place of the lost
sense of Empire…Under the pressure of
these accumulative influences we would expect to see a fairer system of
election at last introduced into Parliamentary contests and a considerable
measure of devolution to new Provincial Assemblies…On a small scale the experience of the Isle
of Man and of the Channel Islands can be very instructive, and may provide the model
for the future administration of such highly individualistic areas of England as
Cornwall.”

No cavilling please.This was
five years after the formation of Mebyon Kernow put Cornish nationalism in the
spotlight.It was on the basis of that
fact that John Banks insisted that the reference to Cornwall go in.And not without some scepticism from the Scots
and the Welsh.Transgenerational thinking,
by its very nature, takes time to reach fruition.It often seems as if no fruit will ever be
forthcoming.Persevere though, and the bountiful
harvest will be a most memorable occasion.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Concerning the reputed 'hustings' held at Witney by Churches Together recently, Colin Bex states that:

"Of the twelve candidates nominated for Witney – all duly
paid up to stand for Parliament – only five were chosen and just 1% of
constituents were allowed to witness this 2015 travesty of democracy in a third
millennium British general election."

Colin today issued a press release in response; the following is the draft circulated within the Party:

PRESS RELEASE

ELECTION SPECIAL – 28th April 2015

CONSTITUENCY – WITNEY, OXON,
WESSEX

FOLKMOOT HUSTINGS

On Saturday 2nd May 2015 at noon – by the Butter Cross on
Church Green (St. Mary's), Witney

Hosted by Colin Bex, candidate for the Wessex Regionalists

FORMAT

Weather permitting, this traditional Folkmoot on a town
church green will be entirely informal, free and open to all including of
course Freemen and Freewomen of Wessex and England
in accordance with traditional common law rights to enjoy open space in the shire
county of Oxon
in Wessex.

A Town Crier will be elected from amongst those assembled by
a minimum two-thirds majority, and will act as moderator for the proceedings –
boos, cheers and applause proportionably permitted as and when may be
appropriate.

Especially welcome will be any of some 35,000 Witney people
who sought but were refused entry to witness the sanitised charade of
theatrical hypocrisy staged on Friday 10th April by Churches Together against
democracy.

Wessex Regionalists candidate Colin Bex will provide a
welcome and he will present a summary of some of the Party’s key proposals and
policies for which he seeks support for the region in the election. This will be followed by a session for
questions and answers from those in attendance.

Upon indication by the Moderator thereafter, each and any
other candidate present who was excluded by Churches Together against
democracy will be welcomed to speak for five minutes on matters of their
choice, likewise followed by up to ten minutes of questions and answers to
allow as many people as possible – especially the young – to participate in the
moot.

Upon conclusion of the contributions, Colin Bex will
summarise the main points and, after the Moderator's declaration of formal adjournment
(and weather permitting), there will be an opportunity, for those who wish, to
enjoy a picnic on the Green taking care to dispose of all wrappings, bottles
and other debris in waste-bins nearby.

Whilst not confirmed – responses from invitations to Morris
dancers from Wessex and Mercia are
being awaited to provide entertainment if available.

Alternatively, and /or in addition, those so inclined may
prefer to adjourn across the road to The Company of Weavers, or to one of many
other inns and hotels in the vicinity.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Last week, BBC1 aired a programme called Millionaire Basement Wars.It described how, over the past decade, some 2,000 new basements have
been excavated beneath high-value properties in central London, most notably in the Royal Borough of
Kensington & Chelsea.The buildings
are often listed, so there’s little scope to extend up or out.That only leaves down.

Some basements are merely one-storey.Some are two-storey.Some, known
as ‘icebergs’, are bigger than the house above them.They provide room for all those essentials
that wouldn’t otherwise fit.The
cinema.The gym.The sauna.The swimming pool.The
hairdressing, manicure and pedicure suite.The garage for five classic cars.In one case, the developer provided an indoor, underground waterfall, 30
feet high.Why?Rich people get bored easily, he explained,
so they need something to talk about.

That’s the problem with extreme wealth.It’s so boring.There’s a point beyond which increased wealth
doesn’t make you any happier.All it
does is deprive others of the happiness that that wealth, better distributed,
could have given them.Economic
efficiency without social efficiency doesn’t deliver the greatest good of the
greatest number.‘Trickle-down economics’
just distorts priorities, increasing the production of, say, caviar rather than
hospitals.

Saying this isn’t ‘envy’ at all.Envy is wanting a better life for yourself and expecting somebody else
to do something about it.Wanting a
better life for everyone isn’t envy.It’s justice.The Scandinavians have a phrase for their supportive social welfare
system that explains why they also have a culture of enterprise: ‘secure enough
to dare’.

Of course, the same is true of power.When you think what could be done, locally and regionally, with just a
fraction of the taxes we send up to London every year to subsidise the
infrastructure of imaginary money-making, it’s enough to leave you feeling
genuinely sick.

We’ve allowed ourselves to become the easy victims of a narrative of
aspiration.One in which the minor folk
turn on each other and not on those whose industrial-scale grasping is what makes
us minor.‘Hard-working families’ has
become the must-have soundbite for all politicians with ambition.You can almost hear the anxious twitching of
curtains and the rumbustious rustling of today’s Daily Mail.There are two
things wrong with it.One, naturally. is
the idea that only families count.That
those working too hard to have time to form a family contribute nothing to
society.The other is that ‘hard work’
is easily recognisable. It isn’t.

In the commercial sector, hard work will get you nowhere if what you’re
working hard on isn’t profitable.It’s
the quality – that's to say, the relevance – of what you’re doing that
matters, not its quantity.Working
smarter, not harder, is the key to productivity and profitability.All economy, as Karl Marx noted, is economy
of labour time.In 1932 Bertrand Russell
wrote a very perceptive essay entitled In
Praise of Idleness, in which he pointed out that ultimately the purpose of
work is to create the ability to stop doing it.That in turn poses other questions.How much of the work we currently do is necessary work?How much of it would we miss if it weren’t
there?

Arguably, a lot, perhaps most, of the work we do is highly damaging, psychologically,
socially and environmentally, in which case our quality of life would be
greatly improved not by economic growth but by economic shrinkage.High net immigration is a sign of an
unhealthy economy, one that is taking more than its fair share of the world’s
resources and so dragging in the inhabitants of other countries who have come
here to follow their wealth.Internal
migration, with London as the magnet, is another aspect of the same phenomenon,
driven in that case by the power that London has to tax the provinces for its
benefit.The only solutions that the
London parties can imagine – like HS2 – do not enable those provinces to serve
themselves but only reinforce metropolitan dominance.Underpinning them all is the silly idea that
we can have more growth in total, let alone that we need it or want it.

We can see the outlines of a better solution forming but before we
examine it further, let’s remind ourselves how irrelevant the London parties
are to it.

The Blue Tories have been so busy lately promising give-aways it’s a wonder
they’ve not been arrested for corrupt electoral practices.Right-to-Buy is always a vote-winner because
who’s going to vote against free money?Since the super-rich don’t pay tax, it’s the squeezed middle who’ll foot
the bill and they always vote for the Blue Tories anyway.Plus, they can be pacified by exempting
up-to-one-million-pound properties from Inheritance Tax.Those whose homes have accelerated in value
while they sat back and did nothing will enrich their children and consider it
all their own really ‘hard work’.As
we’ve shown, half of all Inheritance Tax receipts come from London and the
south-eastern corner of England.It’s
the taxes of every other corner that have created the boom economy there and
it’s the taxes of every other corner too that will make up the shortfall in UK
Government revenue if no tax is paid on homes up to £1 million.

Do we have the right to be angry?Wait and see.

The Yellow Tories’ pitch to the public is that they’re the party to
rein-in the extremes.Without their
moderating presence we could see radical change.Cameron-Farage.Or even Miliband-Sturgeon.Time was when the Liberals viewed themselves
as radicals.Middle-of-the-road radicals
maybe, but at least nominally radical.There’s a strong possibility though that they’ve misread the times in
which they now operate.There’s a thirst
for change, with Scotland leading the charge.And that thirst for change operates in the wider context of a European
revolt against Wall Street corporate colonialism and its dismantling of
democracy.The way money is being
shovelled into the Purple Tories shows how far even the old guard have lost
trust in the established parties and want things shaken up, just a little.

The Greens are promising to build 500,000 homes, against the
200,000 promised by both Blues and Reds.(The
Yellows want 300,000, including at least
ten new garden cities.)In the areas under pressure, there isn’t
enough derelict land to provide anywhere near those sort of figures.So if you’re not comfortable with seeing the
Wessex countryside transformed into New West London, that’s yet another option
to cross off the list.What’s “green”
about turning (mostly) greenfield sites into half a million houses?

The Red Tories look every bit as irrelevant as the rest.When Miliband tries to position them as the
voice of working people throughout the UK, it’s a muffled echo from the 70s
that won’t do any more.Who are really
the selfish nationalists?The SNP, who
speak for Scotland and ignore the other home nations (while practising a
genuine internationalism)?Or Labour,
who speak for the UK and ignore the rest of Europe (while boldly going wherever
the White House directs)?Labour are
trying to tap into a sense of British-based solidarity that died with the
industries Thatcher slaughtered.For
three decades they’ve been trying to get it back.They can’t admit they’ve failed.And that’s why they’re being superseded.

We look forward to the continuing wipe-out of the Unionist parties in
Scotland.In Wales, it will take
longer.Despite Leanne Wood’s master stroke in describing the London parties as four shades of grey, the fact is
that the Welsh seem to like their bondage too much to break free of it right
now.It is, however, only a matter of
time.Renewed interest in regionalism
and federalism within England points to a generalised demand for
self-government that will not stop at Celtic borders.And will not be content with any
cobbled-together nonsense of metro mayors or combined authorities either.

What we’re seeing is a convergence of several themes.Perhaps the most pivotal is the rise to real
power of the first generation who lived through Thatcherism as young adults,
who watched the kindlier world of their childhood being shattered by brash
London loadsamoneys, backed up by a semi-fascist State with no respect for
local democracy.(A State that aped
Labour instead of really challenging it.)No wonder there’s a thirst for change: vengeance has been long awaited.

Such change requires a framework for action, one which the idea of a
Europe of small nations and historic regions readily provides.The scale of change throughout Europe over
the next decade, as one country copies another, could well match that which
followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.This time it will be the turn of the old imperial states of western Europe
and the smug elites they defend.The
only role here for dinosaurs like France, Spain or the UK is to keep getting in
the way until patience can be contained no longer.

At the regional level, and that of small nations of equivalent scale,
there’s a lot of work to be done, in creating new institutions, breathing life
into long-suppressed identities, and in taking back our stolen wealth and power
from London and its co-conspirators.At
the European level, there’s even more to be done.To break the economic and political
stranglehold of the USA and awake to our common interest as Europeans.To take the banking system apart and bring to
justice the thieves who run it.To create
the climate of thought that will allow our vital industries and services to be
taken back into common ownership with little or no compensation payable to
those who have sucked them dry.To end
private landed estates not through the minor irritant of taxation but through a
radical re-evaluation of title.

Those who wait for the Labour Party to even consider such a programme
will wait for ever.The programme is one
that needs to be more radical than anything on Attlee’s agenda in 1945.Even to do as much as Attlee did is
impossible in today’s Britain.It won’t
be done at the British level, because the British level is now irrelevant.It’s a job for the Europe of a Hundred
Flags.Change will come about through
the growth of nationalist and regionalist parties that are not afraid to define
London as their adversary.Not the
London of ordinary Londoners but the London of assumptions, assumptions of
innate superiority in politics, economics and culture.

Labour cannot deliver that.Labour have their sights on way too many marginals in London and the
surrounding shires to ever be credible as an authentic voice for marginalised
Britain.Labour have no plans to cut off
London’s drip-feed of our tax money.Labour have no plans to abolish entire Whitehall departments in favour
of genuine localism.They have no plans
to get even with the parasitical City of London.They have no plans to shut down huge swaths
of London's cultural funding and disperse it across the UK.That is why the nationalist and regionalist
parties must do all of this for them.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Welcome publicity was received this week from the National Secular
Society, the result of a survey of the views of minor parties on secularism and
religion.

The NSS focused-in on our policy of phasing-out religious involvement in
publicly-funded education.Ironic, given
King Alfred’s victory for Christianity over paganism?Well, that was the accusation in one tweet that followed.The fact is of course that we’re the party
for the Wessex of today and
tomorrow, not the Wessex
of 878.We’ve described before how our
ruralist outlook, coupled with a radical distrust of privilege, cannot
reconcile the London parties’ rhetoric about choice in education with the
reality in many villages. That is to say, the long shadow cast by Victorian aristocratic
patronage of the Anglican cause.In some
counties, well over half the primary schools are Anglican-run.Some choice.

Our schools policy sits alongside other policies – such as
disestablishment of the Church of England within Wessex – that stem from a belief
that in a successfully pluralist society the State must always strive to be
impartial.Defenders of the status quo
routinely condemn any move to strip away religious privilege in the UK as ‘persecution’.No, it isn’t.Persecution is what Christians are suffering in the Middle
East.That persecution –
and the corresponding privileging of a brutally intolerant brand of
Mahometanism – is more easily countered if our own conscience is clear.Are we truly different from, say, Iran?Not while the UK is the only other country in the
world to have clerics sitting in its legislature as of right.

Among the leading London
parties, the cross-party consensus is now well established: public services are
not to be provided by public bodies.Instead, public money is to be given to private interests, with few if
any conditions, to enable them to stoke the fires of sectarianism.Faith schools today, faith hospitals tomorrow?With faith welfare to follow, complete with tests
of proper religious observance for the poor and needy?

If Ed Miliband can see no problem in deepening the consensus then his
long-distance vision may need correcting.A favourite scenario on the far Right is an England that has descended into
civil war as immigrants battle it out with the English.Bradford and Birmingham
become Baghdad and Beirut.As scenarios go, it may not attract a high degree of probability.High enough though to ask whether
policy-makers know what they’re doing when they hand millions from our taxes to
those with a vested interest in the cultivation of mutual suspicion.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

It was a cynical charade of a hustings on Friday, organised by
Churches Together against democracy, from which not only a majority of
candidates was excluded, so too I learn were the local and national press, all
of whom informed me they were not best pleased, and took numerous shots of all
of us demonstrators outside the church.

The final straw came when I and the press were waiting to
lobby Cameron as he exited from a secluded side-door of the church, when MI5,
MI6 – and for all I know the FBI – surrounded the entourage and hustled them
down a yet more remote path and on into one unmarked vehicle of a number of
armoured Chelsea tractors in which they were whisked away into the Witney
darkness to destinations unknown.

There should be a case against this with the Electoral
Commission – any one up for it? I'm
rather tied up just now...

A letter in today's Oxford
Mail by local Brigitte Hickman sums up the proceedings well, while a report
in yesterday's edition includes a reference to Wessex Regionalists amongst
those demonstrating outside for having been banned from participating.

I am keeping an eye out for hustings in the constituency and
will post details.That's all for now –
back to the campaign trail.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

In his first report from the campaign trail, Colin Bex has highlighted
some familiar territory for us, and for smaller parties generally, and that’s the
refusal of those in authority to allow our case to be heard.

Witney Churches Together have again arranged a hustings from which Colin
– along with candidates from all the other less established parties – has been
barred.Not just from participating but
even from attending.The reason WCT –
motto ‘The Churches of Witney are here to serve God and the community’ – reportedly
gave for barring Colin was that ‘I don’t know you so I can’t trust you’.It seems they’d rather vote for the devil they
do know than give a platform to a candidate determined to open up our politics to a breath of fresh air.

Colin intends to mount a protest outside, before and after the meeting.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Bex is back.Our President is
taking on David Cameron, who this time is defending his Witney seat not as
Leader of the Opposition but as Prime Minister, having presided over a
government notable for its indifference to the suffering of ordinary folk, in Wessex and elsewhere across our Disunited Kingdom.

A vote for Cameron is a vote for more austerity.A vote for the other leading London parties is little different, austerity-lite,
but austerity all the same.A vote for
Bex is a vote to take back our stolen power and wealth and to shape our lives
and communities for ourselves.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

We recently reiterated that regionalisation doesn’t stop just because
the ruling parties at Westminster
have an ideological blindspot about it.

Budgetary pressures are forcing all the emergency services to think
about sharing work to spread the burden.The ambulance service is now fully regionalised, apart from the Isle of Wight.Fire brigade mergers are all the rage and five Wessex counties
already share a control room network, four being in the ‘South West’ and one in
the ‘South East’.The areas used for
policing have transcended county boundaries for well over a generation now –
only four Wessex counties still have their own force – and work-sharing is
becoming more commonplace.

Last month the Devon & Cornwall and Dorset constabularies announced
link-up plans.In Cornwall, where the 1967 merger with a couple
of English forces still rankles, the announcement was met with dismay, even
though fears that a formal merger is planned seem, so far, to be exaggerated.What they have done is prompt urgent discussion
about what a Cornish-centred alternative would look like.Could the three emergency services, four if
the coastguard is included, work together as a unit under a National Assembly of
Cornwall?

Well, why not?Cornwall is geographically isolated, giving
it coastal issues that are far more acute than elsewhere, and if it wants to do
things its own way, nobody else will suffer.Mergers for mergers’ sake make about as much sense as managing
Shetland’s water supply from the Scottish mainland (and yes, that’s been the
case since 1996).If the Isle of Wight
can have its autonomy in ambulance and fire cover, why not Cornwall, with four times
its population?And could that hold for
policing too?

The emergency services working together sounds like common sense and
it’s not an idea unique to Cornwall.In Somerset,
the three services are exploring the possibility of developing joint blue light
response facilities, sharing workshops, offices and crew welfare provision.At the same time, integration within each of the three services in
different areas seems likely to continue alongside integration between them in the same area.The balance to be struck will vary according
to the terrain.In an area like Wessex, where
county boundaries can appear quite theoretical on the ground, closer links
across them may be the way to make savings.In more geographically distinct areas this may make much less sense than
pooling resources locally.

That, of course, is the beauty of a regionalist and localist approach to
problem-solving.It’s not about
one-size-fits-all.It is all about capitalising
on the value of difference. But with the three services all now developing different local alliances, and therefore different operational boundaries, who, short of the-powers-that-be in London, will provide a strategic overview? Time for devolution to get its act together.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

The following is a review of Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist
Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More, by John C. Médaille, published in
2011 by ISI Books of Wilmington, Delaware, USA.

When in my wife’s home town of Weirton, West Virginia, it is almost
impossible not to notice the words “WEIRTON STEEL – AN ESOP COMPANY” written in
giant lettering on the roof of the steel mill that dominates the town.Weirton Steel was, for a long time, West Virginia’s biggest
employer.But these days, the mill is
operating at less than a third of its total capacity and that mantle has been
passed to Wal-Mart, a company, owned by the obscenely wealthy Walton family,
which pays its employees so little that new entrants are given guides on how to
claim welfare benefits in order to supplement their wages.It brutally illustrates a theme running
throughout this important book from John Médaille, namely that capitalism, far
from being socialism’s polar opposite, inevitably leads to it when left
unchecked.

Médaille is one of the leading advocates in America today of distributism, a
political philosophy rooted in Catholic social teaching.Whilst he can in no way be accused of running
away from his Catholicism, Toward a Truly
Free Market is written for a general audience, so the smell of incense is
not as overpowering as it can be with some distributist works.

The first section of the book provides a general overview of
economics.Médaille prefers the term 'political economy', the name by which it was usually known until some time in
the last century, when it changed as a result of economists’ desire to paint
their discipline as a natural science like physics, rather than the result of
conscious choices by governments and societies.Speaking as someone for whom the business pages of the newspaper may as
well be written in Estonian, it is testament to Médaille’s skills as a teacher
that I was able to understand most of it.

There then follows a series of chapters on specific topics relating to
the problems caused by morality-free capitalist economics and how to fix
them.The key doctrine, on which all the
rest hinge, is that of the just wage.Médaille avoids giving a specific figure for this wage, as that will be
different in different times and places.Rather, he bases it on general principles: that it should be enough to
support a family’s basic needs on a single full-time income; that it should be
enough to also allow that family to save money instead of living pay cheque to
pay cheque; and that it should give them security against enforced periods of
unemployment (sickness, layoffs etc) with minimal recourse to welfare benefits.

Finally, the book considers in detail two examples of distributism in
practice: the region of Emilia-Romagna,
on which more shortly; and the Mondragon co-operative.The latter is a network of workers’
co-operatives in Spain
with over 100,000 members and €33 billion in assets.The survey of its activities provides the
launch pad for a more general overview of the co-operative movement and of ESOP
(Employee Stock Ownership Program) companies, which give workers a stake in
their ownership.Médaille warns that
there exist fake ESOPs such as Enron, created primarily as a tax dodge, but
commends the real thing (I’m afraid I don’t know which category Weirton Steel
falls into).He also sees strong unions
as vital for worker participation in the economy, though as he is writing
within an American milieu, the restoration of the guilds doesn’t play as large
a part in his thoughts as it traditionally did for English distributists such
as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

There isn’t space in a review to do justice to the full range of
Médaille’s arguments, but two things particularly commend it to Wessex
Regionalists for me.The first is the
chapter on the role of government.Médaille
vigorously defends the ability of government to provide for the common good, as
against the current political orthodoxy, which sees it as an impediment to the
ultimate goal of capitalism without democracy (hence the current round of
secret trade negotiations seeking to give corporations the right to sue
governments for any regulations they deem too onerous).His philosophy of government revolves around
what he terms a horizontal and a vertical axis, represented by the principles
of solidarity and subsidiarity respectively.Solidarity means the creation of networks between different sectors of
society, and different governments.It
particularly means the ‘preferential option for the poor’, examining all
policies in the light of how they affect the most vulnerable in society.Subsidiarity means that no decision should be
taken at a higher level of government that could be implemented at a lower
one.It means both local control and
local funding, since funding dispensed from central government to local
communities can appear to be 'free' money, leading to irresponsibility in the
decision-making process.These
principles have always been at the heart of Wessex Regionalist thinking, and it
is a pleasure to see them so eloquently expressed.

The section on Emilia-Romagna, the
Italian region centred on Bologna,
will also be of interest to readers of this blog.35% of the GDP of the region is supplied by
co-operatives, but unlike Mondragon, where the co-operatives operate like
divisions of a single company, the Emilian co-operatives are independent firms,
of varying sizes, all supported by a regional development agency (ERVET) and
the National Confederation of Artisans (CNA).Unfortunately, the questions that Wessex Regionalists will naturally be
asking themselves at this point are not ones that the book really concerns
itself with.How did co-operatives
become such a large part of the economy?How big a part did Italy’s
decentralised system of government, with strong regions, play in allowing them
to flourish in this way?Which parties
and political groupings supported the development and which opposed it
(Médaille does mention that the Fascists suppressed the co-operatives in the
1930s)?Nonetheless, I commend this book
as a starting point that will hopefully lead Wessex Regionalists towards
further investigation of Emilia-Romagna as a
potential model for our region’s economy, rather than Wessex becoming
one more plantation in the global slave state.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Today in 1320 the Scottish nobility issued the Declaration
of Arbroath, with its ringing line about fighting not for glory, nor riches, nor
honours, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with
life itself.

And the contemporary response is Frenchgate.Nicola Sturgeon says she didn’t say it.The French Ambassador says she didn’t hear
it.The French Consul-General says he
didn’t report it.And the irony is that
if Sturgeon had said that Ed Miliband
isn’t prime ministerial material, no-one, except possibly Miliband himself,
would have any reason to disagree.

Miliband – the same goes for Cameron, his equal in
competence – is one of the last generation of old-style Westminster politicians, unable to understand
why the political world no longer revolves around them.They push the buttons
and pull the levers that used to deliver power, only to find that the wires
have been cut.

The Big Two keep trying to convince us that this election is
about which of them we’d prefer as PM.It isn’t.It’s not about them at
all.You can’t tell the difference, so
it really doesn’t matter.Either of them
would be equally good or equally bad at heading up the next
administration.The important question
is what kind of administration they will lead.If you want the Blue Tories, vote Cameron.If you want the Red Tories, vote
Miliband.If you want something else, vote
for something else and see it in coalition, applying pressure where it
hurts.Never before have the smaller parties
had logic so firmly on their side.It’s
so frighteningly true that a grand coalition of the Blues and the Reds still
looks a definite possibility as the way to head off irreversible change for the
better.Proportional
representation.Real localism.And real regionalism.

Sturgeon said that last week’s televised debate between
seven of the party leaders illustrated that "two-party
politics at Westminster
is over".A ripple of surprise
ran through the commentariat that interesting things are being said outside the rigidly controlled London circle.England wants to vote SNP/Plaid in
its millions, and it can’t.It’s so
frustrating, isn’t it?And all because
the media have been so obsessed with Farage and his twilight band of empire-loyalists
that they failed to spot where the future really lies, in a Europe
not looking back to the 19th century but forward to the 21st.Plaid Cymru have put out a splendid little poster
bearing the slogan ‘Don’t vote Labour for your fathers’ sake; vote Plaid for
your children’s’.

We would have liked to be there in Salford.Our invitation was presumably lost in the
post.(So too was Mebyon Kernow’s; they
haven’t even been invited to the BBC South West regional debate in Plymouth, despite fighting every seat in Cornwall.)The Twittersphere may have been too busy swooning over Leanne Wood’s
Welsh accent to notice her policies but Wessex has a lovely accent too, and
lovely policies to match.Next time,
will the regionalists will be joining the nationalists on stage?That depends on how fast the decentralist
trend now accelerates.

Last week saw the launch of the Northern Party, a
pan-Northumbrian movement that has grown out of the relaunched Campaign for the
North.Its claimed territory overlaps
with those of Yorkshire First and the North East Party.Is that good or bad?Lack of agreement on areas and boundaries is surely
bad if it slows down the debate, but not if it brings it to the fore.If regionalists up north can afford the
luxury of disagreement then they must be making very good progress indeed.And, for this election at least, there will
be no clashing candidacies.

The Northern Party’s top team includes Harold Elletson,
former Conservative MP for Blackpool North.Its registered Leader is Michael Dawson, nephew of Hilton Dawson, the former
Labour MP for Lancaster & Wyre who leads the North East Party.Yorkshire First is led by Richard Carter, ex-Labour,
and its candidates at this election include a former FibDem MEP.Across the political spectrum then,
devolutionary aspirations are being unlocked.Those who have devoted their political lives to the unresponsive London parties are
emerging, blinking, into the light.We
watch, fascinated and vindicated, as northerners cast off time-wasting pressure
groups buzzing around the London
leaderships and make a bid for actual, unfettered control of what goes on in
their areas.If that’s a universal
trend, we can look forward to a few defections in Wessex too.

What the desperate London
parties simply cannot grasp is the extent to which their rule is increasingly
hated as London
takes more and more and gives less and less.What we loathe above all is the way we’re expected to feel grateful that
London thrives on
our taxes, yet treats us as ignorant peasants who need to be told what to think,
even about ourselves.There are some real
shocks to the system coming up.The 7th of
May marks the day they start, not end.